Jim Gaffigan Is the King of (Clean) Comedy

Jim Gaffigan has nothing against crudeness and curse words—he just happened to vault to success without them. How top comics feel about working clean in an ever-dirtier world.

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Jim Gaffigan has nothing against crudeness and curse words—he just happened to vault to success without them.
Chris Buck for The Wall Street Journal

By

Don Steinberg

Updated March 14, 2013 8:53 p.m. ET

Jim Gaffigan's comedy covers a wide range of domestic issues, including the fact that he and his wife, Jeannie, actually have five children under age 9 in a two-bedroom New York apartment.

Clean comedians in a dirty world. A story on obscenity and comedy, particularly on television, and the way the rules really have changed under our noses. Photo: AP.

"You know what it's like having five kids?" he asks his audience. "Imagine you're drowning. And someone hands you a baby." He says his favorite ride at Disney World during a recent family visit was "the air-conditioned bus back to the airport." Sometimes he talks about how pale his complexion is: Picture a pastier Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Mr. Gaffigan's specialty, though, is food. His riff about the perils of Hot Pockets plays on college students' iPods everywhere and has become his "Born to Run," a required finale at his performances. "Death-pockets!" he singsongs. "Take out of box, place directly in toilet...Flush Pock-ets!"

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Onstage for a recent two-show night in Montclair, N.J., dressed in his usual all black for contrast, he unveiled his latest food riffs: Why are there so many paintings of fruit? It's because no one wants to eat fruit. All the fruit is still there in the bowl next day in case you didn't complete your painting. But if you want to paint a doughnut, "you'd better get it in the first sitting." He apologizes for being sort of fat, but explains: "I'm preparing for a role. A cinnamon roll."

If you listen carefully as he tears through his set, something else is apparent: Jim Gaffigan works clean. He resists profanity. He doesn't rip celebrities with crude insults. He won't reveal everything you didn't want to know about his sexual urges and private parts. At a time when comedy is as filthy as it's ever been—the industry euphemism is "edgy"—Mr. Gaffigan, working clean, has become one of the hottest comedians in the country. He was one of the top 10 touring comedians in North America last year, according to Pollstar. This Friday he begins a two-week, 16-city U.S. tour that will take him across the South and Midwest, with his entire family in tow (the kids will sleep on the tour bus between cities). Mr. Gaffigan's latest album, "Mr. Universe," was nominated for a Grammy. He has a book coming out in May, titled "Dad Is Fat" (it was the first complete sentence that his son Jack wrote).

And Mr. Gaffigan really has been preparing for a role. At 6 a.m. on the morning after his two sold-out performances in New Jersey, a car picked him up and transported him to his children's school, where he began six days filming a sitcom pilot for CBS, tentatively called "Gaffigan." He plays a version of himself, a hapless, chubby dad in what he calls a "nonadversarial marriage," raising five children in New York City.

The show is co-written with his real-life nonadversarial wife, Jeannie (though she is played by Mira Sorvino), and with Peter Tolan, known for writing "Rescue Me" and "The Larry Sanders Show," two series built around comedians ( Denis Leary and Garry Shandling). CBS will announce in May whether it will greenlight the show as a series for the fall season.

It used to be that wholesome shows like this were the only kind that got on TV—and only comedians with squeaky-clean acts had a chance to make it so big. Bill Cosby, who worked clean, became the first African-American co-star of a network television show, "I Spy," at age 28 in 1965. Redd Foxx, who had begun performing earlier but worked blue, was 49 before he got "Sanford and Son." In 1967, Joan Rivers went on "The Ed Sullivan Show" eight months pregnant but couldn't say "pregnant" on TV. Now you can get pregnant on TV.

Watchdogs and Puritans have complained since ancient times about the coarsening of culture, of course. The CBS prime-time lineup Mr. Gaffigan is attempting to break into includes "2 Broke Girls" and "Two and a Half Men," successful sitcoms that have blazed new trails in explicit banter about oral sex. This past New Year's Eve on CNN—CNN!—comedian Kathy Griffin spent much of the night threatening to handle Anderson Cooper's crotch and kissed the mortified anchorman in the region. On Showtime the same night, Andrew Dice Clay, known for his dirty versions of nursery rhymes, had his first TV special in 17 years, a triumphant return to a now routinely vulgar entertainment world he helped create. Mr. Clay is as mainstream as ever—he will appear in the next Woody Allen movie.

In a climate where the profane has become mundane, sticking to clean comedy might seem like engaging in a form of monastic abstinence, or just square. For Mr. Gaffigan, "it's just how it comes out," he says, blaming his Midwestern roots. "There's something about cursing in public where I have a hesitation to do it."

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'If [bad language] really worked, everybody would do it and they would all be huge stars.' - JerrySeinfeld
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Mr. Gaffigan, 46, was raised in Chesterton, Ind., where "the closest thing to the entertainment industry was probably that we had a marching band," he says. His father was a small-town banker who programmed his six children to seek job security: "The looming fear of possibly being homeless was driven in at an early age." Mr. Gaffigan studied finance and moved to New York to work in advertising. He'd always loved watching comedy, though, and started moonlighting in clubs.

"For seven years I went through a lot of different styles of stand-up. I did impressions, I did voices. I was angry up there. I was silly. And I kind of settled in," he says. "You want to be authentic."

It's an axiom of stand-up: Comedians hit their stride when they become comfortable with themselves on stage, so audiences can be.

"In full disclosure, I did curse occasionally," Mr. Gaffigan says. "But I felt like I wasn't done writing the joke if I was relying on a curse word. It's like, we're all adults here, and some of my favorite comedians are really filthy. But I'm an eccentric observation guy. If you're talking about minimuffins, is it really necessary to say f—?"

When Mr. Gaffigan recorded his first album in 2004, a young producer directed him to add curse words: "This guy said college kids want to hear curse words. I'd been doing stand up at that point for 10 years." But he complied.

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Bill Cosby
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There is a school of thought that adding nasty language to jokes is like riding the Tour de France on EPO—a booster shot that not everyone takes. "We used to kid that it was kind of like Hamburger Helper. There was no real meat there, just some little idea that was pumped up by being dirtier," says Jimmy Brogan, former head monologue writer for "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno," who performs around the country billing himself as a clean comedian.

Gilbert Gottfried, known for the weapons-grade raunch of his often-hilarious TV-roast monologues, says when he was starting out in comedy, he'd skip vulgarities to see if his lines were fundamentally funny.

"I'd say 'have sex with' rather than the four-letter word. I wanted to see which bits actually worked by themselves," he says.

Getting laughs with just clean material, as Mr. Gaffigan does, "is harder. It's just harder," says Bob Newhart, who sold millions of albums working clean and starred in two hit TV series. "I got a certain satisfaction out of getting a response from the audience and knowing I'd done something that may be harder."

What exactly is harder about it? Well, naughty words and topics can get an additional audience burst, releasing anxieties about taboo thoughts. (Freud wrote a whole book about jokes and the subconscious.) Comedy is about surprise, and a well-timed bad word is a fine way to get there. Often, performers willing to venture onto offensive ground early—for example, Lenny Bruce's pioneering obscenity—won reputations as bold satirists partly by breaking such boundaries. When Sarah Silverman said she wanted to adopt terminally ill babies—because babies are cute but she didn't want to make long-term commitments—it was a classic false-logic joke (who'd really do that?) hauled into a dicey new neighborhood. She got an extra gasp for the taboo idea, it's material she staked out before anyone else got there and it fit her onstage persona.

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Comedian Jim Gaffigan
Chris Buck for The Wall Street Journal

Bill Cosby says bad words, on their own, can make a difference. "How the f— are you doing?" establishes a different rapport with an audience than "How are you doing?" he says. On the other hand, he relates one joke that he cleaned up, swapping out the word "s—" for "act." An older married couple dies, leaving behind adult children, and they're told they can enter heaven if they ask God a question he can't answer. They ask: "When are our children gonna get their act together?"

"The laugh is just as strong as if I put in the four-letter word," Mr. Cosby says.

Like most subjects, among comedians the clean/dirty issue is open to debate. Jerry Seinfeld famously keeps his act clean but says the distinction isn't relevant. "There's no ticket to hilarious," he says in an interview. "If [bad language] really worked, everybody would do it and they would all be huge stars." Mr. Seinfeld was quoted recently saying that if he used profanity he could develop an hour of new material in a week. But he demurs.

"That was just me being silly. I really couldn't," he says. "I will say that if you have a bit, and it's got swear words in it, and it gets a huge laugh, it may or may not be funny. But if you have a bit that has no swear words, and it gets a huge laugh, it's definitely funny. Maybe it's like a spice that a cook might use in a recipe that has a very strong flavor. It doesn't make a restaurant successful because they use a lot of strong spices. You could have two dishes of pasta, and one is incredibly spicy red sauce, and the other is just butter and Parmesan cheese, and any person could prefer either one. One isn't better. I'm not really prepared to say one is better."

It's not surprising that creative performers bristle at being labeled, even if being accused of working clean doesn't sound so harsh. Mr. Cosby says he was afraid to say "hell" on stage when his mother was in the audience. He has railed against the use of the n-word by comedians. Still, he says: "When people say, 'Well, you work clean,' it kind of makes me wince. People who know me know I know how to curse."

Mr. Gaffigan, whose act plays in colleges and downtown clubs as well as it does in Middle America, has mixed feelings.

" 'Clean' and 'family-friendly' are supposedly these positive attributes," he says. "But I sometimes feel like it's an asterisk next to my success, or whatever. Maybe I'm being sensitive. I just want to be known as funny. I mean, when you hear about a family-friendly restaurant, you know it's going to be horrible."

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